Industry needs storage management today in open environments for the same reasons that storage management was needed in the mainframe environment in the early and mid-1980s. Businesses are generating data so fast that data storage and data management capabilities are being overwhelmed. If these capabilities cannot handle the growth, then at some point, there is a risk that the next transaction will not be captured, and the business will stop. There are two problems which impact this situation: Storage costs and storage management costs. Storage Area Networks (SANs) are becoming the preferred storage architecture model for block storage systems in comparison to direct attached storage models. This preference for SANs over direct attached storage models is as a result of SANs allowing multiple servers to directly share block storage devices, SAN users not having to purchase servers just to increase the storage capacity and the ability to separate server and storage management.
In order to leverage the benefits of a SAN, it is necessary to be able to easily manage the SAN. SAN management is the set of tools, policies and processes, that provide information about and monitor the devices in a Storage Area Network (SAN). SAN management tools are typically deployed along with every SAN installation.
To manage a SAN it is helpful to have a SAN management tool which can generate topology perspectives, where such perspectives identify hosts, storage devices, switches and any other necessary devices included within the SAN. It is of further benefit to have a SAN management tool which provides a topology perspective of all storage devices that are connected to a particular host (e.g., host centric perspective), a topology perspective of all hosts that are accessing a particular storage device (e.g., device centric perspective). Moreover, it is of further benefit to have a perspective which identifies all nodes (e.g., hosts, storage devices, switches, interconnection devices, etc.) within a SAN which are accessible by a particular node within the SAN (e.g., SAN node perspective).
Currently, every time a system administrator requests a particular type of SAN perspective the SAN management tool retrieves data necessary to satisfy the request by invoking multiple queries from a database associated with the SAN management tool and organizing the retrieved data into the particular type of SAN perspective (e.g., host perspective, storage device perspective, etc.).